Quotes from Charles Yu

I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.

right at that moment, the first times start turning into last times, as in, last first day of school, last time he crawls into bed with us, last time you'll all sleep together like this, the three of you. There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.

He thinks he can't participate in this race dialogue, because Asians haven't been persecuted as much as Black people.

Downtown may be gritty and dark and full of evil but on some level an unspoken belief, a faith that we live in a manageable world with its own episodic rules and conventions: Life takes place one hour at a time. Clues present themselves in order, one at a time. Two investigators, properly paired, can solve any mystery.

AMAZONGOOGLEFACE ANNOUNCES INTENT TO ACQUIRE DISNEYAPPLESOFT The deal would result in a combined company worth approximately $97.3 quadrillion. "This will be good for consumers," said Jeff Bezos, CEO of AmazonGoogleFace, speaking from the company's offices on an icy dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt.

Your relationship having turned into a pantomime, a series of gestures in a well-worn scene, played out again and again, any underlying feeling having long since been obviated by emotional muscle memory, learning how to make the right faces, strike the right poses, not out of apathy or lack of sincerity, rather a need to preserve what was left of his pride.

The pain of having once been young, with muscles, still able to work. To have lived an entire life of productivity, of self-sufficiency, having been a net giver, never a taker, never relying on others.

and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years).

As everyone knows, water hates poor people.

Even now, as Special Guest Star, even here, in your own neighborhood. Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here. Who you are. All you are. Your most salient feature, overshadowing any other feature about you, making irrelevant any other characteristic. Both necessary and sufficient for a complete definition of your identity:

Lying there in the silence, you try to imagine what she could possibly mean. Kung Fu Guy is the pinnacle. How could anyone be more?

Ever since you were a boy, you've dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. You're not Kung Fu Guy. But maybe, just maybe, tomorrow will be the day.

But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.

Ever since you were a boy, you've dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.

You are good," I say. "No I'm not. I'm not I'm not. I'm not," she says. "I'm no good." And then, softly to herself: "Am I?

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the moment back as its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be; you couldn't help but hate her for doing that to herself, and at the same time hate yourself for giving in to it, and underneath all of that, despite your hate for her, couldn't help but love her.

Tonight, I feel small. An entire night in the city seems to be too much for me, too immense for me to get lost in. By now it's past one, the after-hours city is in full swing, and morning is a long way off.

He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim.

Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. Superfluous. Gratuitous. He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva. And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.

Is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority? What? That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream,

KUNG FU KID I'm sorry, Ma. I'm really sorry. MA (waving you off) I don't care about that. Just promise me something, okay? KUNG FU KID Okay. MA Don't grow up to be Kung Fu Guy. KUNG FU KID Okay, okay, I promise. (then) Wait, what? MA You heard me. Don't be Kung Fu Guy. KUNG FU KID Oh. Then what should I be? MA Be more.

All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself.

We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine.